what is Psychotherapy?

Jealousy / abandonment

The experience of separation and loss lies at the heart of the psychotherapy experience. Jealousy is the pernicious counterpart to loss, manifesting as both the signal of the fear of it happening, and, paradoxically, often also its precipitant: a destructive force that destabilises the relationship it seeks to protect.

As human beings, we are from a very early age ‘hard-wired’ to not merely depend on our significant others but actually to invest our very being into them. When confronted with loss, there is not merely a question of needs being not further met, but an actual existential threat being presented. Psychotherapy works to analyse what is at stake in the experience of the loss of love. It seeks to find answers to the question of why a person can become irrational and seemingly seek to destroy the very thing s/he holds closest. Identifying previous relationships, and situating them within the broader life story is at the heart of the psychotherapeutic process. Focusing on patterns of thinking/behaviour and reflecting on the seemingly mad logic behind them is the challenge facing client and therapist in this aspect of clinical work.

Psychotherapy engages with these complaints by encouraging the person in therapy to situate them within their wider life narrative. It will regularly happen that a person’s history, or their wider story including their family background, will provide important clues and early examples of the kinds of dynamics being discussed in the present. Working through in the therapy space some of the emotional resonances of this wider detail can prove very helpful in reducing some of the most painful impacts of jealousy/abandonment issues. Understanding some of the broader, often unconscious implications of these forms of suffering is an important step towards moving free of them.